MISHANDLING OF THE YEAR
Ray Harryhausen was the undisputed king of stop-motion special effects in movies between the 1950s and 70s. By moving puppets in tiny increments between frames, he brought unforgettable monsters to life. In the finished films, the creatures moved gracefully—yet with a slight jerkiness that became Harryhausen’s unmistakable signature, seen in classics like Jason and the Argonauts and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.
I was initially tempted to title this review “Ray Harryhausen’s Big Race”, because the jerky monster movement immediately came to mind when I watched the cars hop along the road in this abominable game. But after revisiting the old master’s work, I realized his creations moved far better than Out Run on the Amiga. Comparing Harryhausen’s artistry to this piss-poor conversion (developed by Probe Software and published by US Gold) would have been downright sacrilegious.
We now know that the Amiga was capable of so much more, but it was often dragged down by the technical limitations of weaker competing platforms. Judging by footage available on YouTube, the Amiga version of Out Run is practically identical to the Atari ST version. Apart from the menus, the graphics look crude, and the engine sound resembles a growling stomach. Only the music is halfway decent—for whatever that’s worth.
But none of that really matters. In a racing game, only controls, responsiveness and a sense of speed count. If you can’t get the framerate right, there’s no point in making a racer at all. In this conversion of Out Run, the lack of fluidity makes it nearly impossible to react to what’s happening on screen. Everything hops around haphazardly, like a stop-motion experiment gone wrong. Releasing a racing game in this choppy state should have resulted in a revoked license—to make any more games.
In this racing atrocity, you drive a Ferrari Testarossa through environments loosely inspired by locations across Europe. The game is divided into five stages, and you must reach a checkpoint before the timer runs out—or it’s game over. Riding shotgun is a blonde bombshell. If you think she’s your girlfriend, I hate to break it to you: judging by the cover art, she may be seeing other people.
The core idea behind Out Run is genuinely cool. Just before each checkpoint, the road splits in two. Depending on whether you turn left or right, you take different routes to the finish. I reached the “a”, “c” and “e” endings—because I’m apparently such an ace driver. To my disappointment, they all ended with the same “funny” scene: the car falling apart after I stepped out. In the arcade original, I believe the ending actually varied depending on the route you took.
All you really need to know is this: Out Run on the Amiga is virtually unplayable, yet embarrassingly easy to beat thanks to a generous time limit. The unplayability stems from the disastrous framerate combined with an awful camera perspective. You control the car from a third-person view, but the camera sits so low behind it that you can barely see the road ahead. Even parts of the road itself are obscured, making it extremely difficult to anticipate upcoming curves. At best, perhaps 20–25% of the screen is used to display the actual road. The rest is filled with a flat, single-color skybox and horizon.
The low framerate causes your car to jerk violently across the screen, and every other vehicle behaves the same way. Add to this a collision system that feels almost random, and you have a perfect recipe for disaster. I frequently drove straight through other cars as if they were desert mirages—only to crash into thin air moments later, sending my Ferrari flipping end over end. Not that it mattered much, since the game allowed me to beat it despite several catastrophic accidents.
I was “lucky” enough to play the game on my Amiga 500 Mini, which emulates it at a higher CPU speed. It also runs as if installed on a hard drive, eliminating the infamous mid-race loading pauses. Sadly, the increased performance doesn’t improve things. If anything, it makes the game harder, as traffic ahead of you now jerks back and forth at an even higher pace.
That’s essentially all there is to say. Out Run on the Amiga is an awful piece of work—an odd combination of impossible to play and easy to win, that fails to get even its most basic priorities straight. I beat the “a” route in three or four attempts, the “e” route in perhaps ten more, and reached the finish line of “c” in the very next race. At that point, I’d had enough.
It hardly feels like an interactive experience at all. At one point I drove straight through rocks at the side of the road at full speed—nothing happened. Moments later, I crashed into a car and came to a dead stop. As I accelerated again, I lightly grazed another rock and my car flipped over at roughly 30 km/h (about 18 mph). In driving school, my instructor told me that’s the maximum speed at which you can hit a pedestrian with minimal risk of severe injury.
I could go on, but you already know more than you ever should about Out Run on the Amiga. Just stay away from it. Play the arcade original instead—just compare the sense of speed. SEGA’s own Master System conversion looks surprisingly good. The Mega Drive/Genesis version comes close to arcade perfection. Hell, even the DOS port seems better than Out Run on the Amiga.
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